Ok so today in class while battling this idea of the goods and evils of vaccines, the topic of HPV came up, I really didn’t know what HPV does to your body until today. So even though I have one dose of the vaccine, I haven’t had the other two required doses. So I decided to do research on what exactly HPV is and how many people complete all three doses.

HPV stands for Human papillomavirus, is the most common sexually transmitted disease in the United States; there are over 100 types of HPV and 13 of them cause cancer . According to the CDC 20 million Americans currently have HPV and 6 more million people will get HPV every year. That’s a staggering number of people being infected. The thing about HPV is that at he moment there are no tests that can tell you whether it’s in your system. Like any sexually transmitted disease you get it from sexual intercourse of any type, it is not just limited to actual penetration; it can be transferred by oral sex.

How can you possibly tell if you have HPV? Well that’s another problem most of HPV infections do not cause symptoms or disease and 90% of them clear up within 2 years. The good thing is that persistent infections with specific types of HPV can lead to precancerous lesions, that if not treated will lead to cervical cancer.

After doing my research on what exactly HPV is, I decided to research exactly what had led to this blog. How many people actually complete the vaccine dosage; HPV is taken as a series of three shots, which I had never understood. According to the GARDASIL site  the reason why it is given in three shots instead of one is due to the fact that during the clinical trials it was shown that it was more effective given in 3 shots over a 6 month period. I stumbled across a Fox news article that discusses the statistics on how many people complete the dosage.

“One earlier study found that 48 percent of teenage girls had received at least one dose in the vaccine series. Berenson said she wanted to know how many of those who start the shot series end up completing it. She and her colleagues looked at the health insurance records of more than 271,000 girls and women, age nine and up, who had gotten a first Gardasil vaccine. They found just 38 out of every 100 of them received the second and third shots in the next year. Berenson’s group also found that since the vaccine became available in 2006, the number of people completing all three doses declined. In pre-teens, for instance, 57 percent of girls in 2006 completed the vaccine series, compared to 21 percent in 2009.”

Further on in the article doctor Berenson talks about why she thinks that people are not completing the dosage, for instance the fact that scheduling a follow up over a period of 6 months is often hard to follow through because of just generally life.

However, this stud is not enough to reject the null hypothesis which is that women are completing the dosage. The reason being is that the sample group is not large enough and is only taking into consideration a small part of the population.